Depth cameras, such as used in Microsoft Corporation's Kinect™ technology, provide depth and other information that may be used for many purposes, including gaming. In general, such relatively inexpensive, commercially available cameras are based upon time-of-flight, where emitted infrared radiation is reflected back to a sensor, with the reflection time corresponding to the distance to objects in the field of view, and/or structured light-based sensing. Given that the camera also may capture clean infrared (and/or RGB data), a depth camera provides (or allows a simple computation of) X, Y and Z data in the camera's local coordinate system for any captured objects in the camera's field of view.
While gaming is one type of application that benefits from such data, a large number of other applications may similarly benefit from knowing the coordinates of users and objects. While applications have used the camera's local coordinates for various purposes, particularly gaming, heretofore the use has been generally limited to interaction with a device such as a gaming console coupled to the camera.